On Thursday 27 September 2007 18:36, Paul Anderson wrote: Back in early 1978 was the first time I'd gotten my hands on any sort of a real working computer... The company I worked for at that time bought a Heathkit H11, and I got to put it together. :-) Initially, all we had for storage was paper tape, which was great fun -- a power glitch, and you had to start all over again, typing in the boot loader sequence, loading the absolute loader tape, then the BASIC tape, then (if you were lucky enough to have saved something of what you were working on), your saved program. Later on they got a disk drive, I'm pretty sure a Digital of one flavor or another. It ran RT-11, I think version 2. In my initial floundering around one of the things I was playing with was a rather crude database, so they could justify the machine. Data being stored in the form of character strings, and the software being written in BASIC. A big mistake on my part was trying to take a simple sort (bubble sort?) that would work on an array of stuff in memory, and to try and make that work with a disk file. That was the only time I've ever seen TO-220 cased transistors actually melt down, after I went home and left the program running... :-) -- Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and ablest -- form of life in this section of space, ?a critter that can be killed but can't be tamed. ?--Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters" - Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James M Dakin